Content Marketing – A simple 3 point starter’s guide

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A lot has been spoken about content marketing. It has been an activity which went viral over the last couple of years. Some of the most successful and popular campaigns for content marketing over the last couple of years include Coca Cola, Mint.com and American Express. These companies have been largely successful in running huge content marketing campaigns because they followed some basic rules of content marketing.

Business Objective:Understand the objective behind a content marketing campaign. Align it with the company objectives. Do they want to brand? Or are they looking to increase visibility online? Are they looking to gather more followers on their social platform or blog? Are they looking to promote and sell their product at the same time?There are many reasons why a company wants to promote itself on various content marketing platforms. Unless you understand the business objective, it will be difficult to run a successful content marketing campaign.

Understand Your Audience:Understanding your audience is an extremely important criterion. You don’t want to be selling combs to a bald man afterall! ☺This will also help you narrow down the channels and platforms that you need to use for content marketing. For example – a younger audience is more likely to be influenced by content marketing campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. since they spend a majority of their time on these websites.

Identify Channels:Narrow down specific platforms and channels which you plan to use for your content marketing plan. There are a lot of channels out there and the key should be to identify a few and go all out on those specific channels. It is easy to get confused and want to do a lot of things on a lot of platforms, all at the same time.Creating strong engagement plans for each channel is better than trying to master all channels at one go. Better be the Master of one than the Jack of none!

Once you have these 3 basics in place, you are all ready to go and start off with your content marketing plan.